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howdoyousayloco · 1 year

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muggy weather and the neighbor's mangoes

Sometimes when it’s muggy out I say it feels like Florida. Even though my hair will be three times more frizzy by the end of the day and I will sweat my eyeliner off, I love every second. It feels like all of my rose-colored memories from when I am pretty sure I didn't have a care in the world even though that is probably not true.

Muggy weather reminds me of mangoes that grew from a branch of a tree in my grandma's neighbor's yard that she would pick from. Except, not "grandma," because to me and my sisters she was "little lela" since we couldn't pronounce Abuela and she was little and frail from years of chemo and had a much smaller presence than Big Lela, my other grandma, who has had plastic surgery and has tattooed makeup and talks loudly and is a little rude.

My little lela's house was where we spent every trip we made in the summer to south florida. She had a ranch-style house, like most people in hialeah do because of hurricane season, and a linoleum porch that i would crouch on when it was raining sometimes to watch it pour down and feel it on my hands because it was different from the rain at home and was warm. The air was so thick after a rainstorm that it weighed down on you and you could feel it against your skin like honey and it was fragrant with the smell of wet earth. In the front room of her house there was a piano with a bench that i would sit at and pluck out "chopsticks" slowly and it would annoy my older sister heavenly and make my mom think i was a musical genius. The floor was always cold, especially when i would walk barefoot in the morning out of the little room with the dollhouse that was actually a refurbished cd case and had two beds that i shared with three sisters that was next to the bathroom with the sign that said "powder room" on it. I would tiptoe so i wouldnt wake anyone up across the house to the yard with the square of sort of pink concrete that was in the middle of the crab grass that was spiky but didnt have ticks like up north so i could run around in it that was surrounded by wire fencing and palm trees and i tried to catch lizards. I didn't often succeed but when i did i would trap them in a little toy pot so i could show my sisters and parents and little lela who would tell me to get it out of the house and wash the toy. She worried a lot. I guess her life gave her a lot of reasons to.

We would congregate for breakfast in the morning in the living room, all eight of us and eat toasted cuban bread with butter and guava con queso pastelitos from vicky bakery that they don't have here up in Jersey that I am always craving and mangoes that are so much better than the ones we get now and café cubano that i wasn't allowed to have because it would make me short with lots of sugar and milk. I look back on those days like im clicking through a ViewFinder held up to the light. Hazy, otherworldly, so far removed from my current life that it makes me question if i was always who i am right now.

We gathered one time, my whole family with my little brother who was born by then and friends of my awela who were tías even though they werent really and my cousins who i didnt really talk to anymore and tías that were actually tías, and sat around a table that we set up in the front room, the one with the piano, that was filled with cuban food. Bread, and pastelitos, and mangoes, and coffee, and black pudding that i was too scared to eat because did you know it's made with blood, and isn't that weird, and a lot of other things that i dont really remember, and we ate and talked and tried to ignore that little lela was in a wheelchair and she was speaking more spanish than english when its usually the opposite and even though she lived ten more years than the doctors said she would i realized she wasnt immortal and it was scary because she had a tremor and i couldn't really understand her and i felt bad that i couldnt talk to her the same way that i used to because her voice was really high and im not good at speaking spanish and i had trouble looking at her in the eyes because i was old enough to know that she didnt have a lot of time left but too young for that to really sink in and i wasnt sure how to act and so i tried to be happy to make her happy and ate a lot of desert and i thought about other things.

After we packed up, said long goodbyes, and i poorly played her a song on my clarinet, my family squished into the seven seater car that somehow held all of us and took the really long ride back to New Jersey where the mangos were not as good and where there were no vicky bakeries and where little lelas house was not, and i sat cramped in the backseat where it smelled like clementines and the sweat of eight people and gas station coffee, and i played on my sisters DS when she let me and felt weird because i knew it would probably be the last time i would be in this car in florida on a road trip. The last time staying in my little lelas house had came and gone, and we went back after that to Big Lelas house but its not magical anymore it just feels like Florida but in the capitalized way that feels like Vacation and Tourists and Disney Adults instead of just our florida that felt like happiness and home and muggy weather and the neighbor's mangos and i miss it every day.

Its strange to think that florida is Florida to some people, and they take a plane, and they dont see any relatives that havent seen them since they were this big dame un besito mi niñita linda tienes un novio? No? Eso es bueno, men are no good. They go to Disneyland, and they probably stay inside when it rains and dont eat at pollo tropical or stay in a house that doesnt fit all your siblings but maybe im just being bitter because i cant go back to the florida that i want to go back to but maybe everyone has a place like that and its just as hard for everyone to lose but oh well, find a new one because life only moves forward and its not always that easy and definitely not as carefree as you imagined that it most likely maybe was in the past, but it could just be the golden sun that always seems to be behind you teasing you with its unreachable warmth on your back even if its still up in the middle of the sky and doesnt actually move and it still shines over everything because life is still ok and the weather can still be hot and humid and beautiful in new jersey too sometimes.

#short story #personal essay #reflective #reflective essay #literature #essay #writer #writers and readers #acadamia #young author #young writer

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